Version: (using KDE Devel) Installed from: Compiled sources I use the Comments field in each songs' tag to track further information that is important to me but usually ignored by music players. I'm beginning to go back through my collection and store this info in an XML-friendly way, to make parsing easier. Example: <Composer>Gil Evans</Composer> <Arranger>Miles Davis</Arranger> <Producer>Teo Macero</Producer> <Player> <Name>Miles Davis</Name> <Instrument>Trumpet</Instrument> <Instrument>Flugelhorn</Instrument> </Player> <Player> <Name>Wynton Kelly</Name> <Instrument>Piano</Instrument> </Player> While I hope to use this later, possibly for my own applications, it would be great to make filtering by this info easier within Amarok. It would be great if Amarok would give me the power to filter by Producer, or Composer, or anything else I track via XML tags. As a music teacher that needs to search a large database of recorded music for students, being able to search for "tunes in the key of B-flat" would be a godsend! I imagine a filtering interface where the tags are recognized, and added as searchable fields inside the drop-down lists found in the "Create Smart Playlist" dialogue. I could pull down the list and select "Composer", and then input "Wayne Shorter".
Oh, I forgot to mention. I realize that constantly scanning the Comments field of a large collection DB, and parsing for XML tags could prove to be a performance nightmare. Instead, I would recommend some way (possibly even flat text config file) to allow the user to "register" their own customs tags with amarok. This way, when amarok has to build a list of searchable fields, it can simply look in this config file for what custom fields have been "registered" by the user, and everything else can be ignored. A trickier part to solve would be how to create tags that are more complex than simple 1:1 mappings (I used simple nesting in my example). Such as who is playing what instruments. This would be something like Player - Artist Name - Instrument(s). At any rate, the goal would be able to create Smart Playlist such as "show me every tune where Miles Davis plays Flugelhorn, as opposed to Trumpet".
This should be done by a script - no need to put it into amarok. we will have tags/labels soon.